4. PHILOSOPHY AS DIALOGUE





    The great dividing line in ancient Greek philosophy--the line which

divides philosophers whose ideas seem remote and unfamiliar from those

whose ideas seem to be more clearly relevant to contemporary philosophical

concerns--comes in the form of a single philosopher who, as far as we

know, never wrote a book. That philosopher, Socrates (470-399), gave a

completely new interpretation of the philosophical task, the full

implications of which took over two thousand years to unfold.  We know

about Socrates' life and ideas primarily through the writings of one of

his close followers, Plato (427-347).  Together with Plato's star pupil,

Aristotle (384-322), these men form the core of the ancient Greek

philosophical tradition.  Although there is no need to remember their

exact dates, it is important to know the order in which they lived.  The

easiest way to do this is by remembering the following picture:



[Figure 4.1:  The Three Great Greek Philosophers]



This reminds us that Socrates was rather old when he influenced the young

Plato, and that he died before Aristotle was born.



    Little is known of Socrates' life, and some scholars even question

whether such a person ever really lived; but for our purposes we can

ignore such debates, since, even if his character was merely an invention

of Plato and his contemporaries, that character has come to serve as a

"myth" that has guided the development of western philosophy for over two

millennia.  Socrates was a highly original thinker who practiced what he

preached.  Although he was a member in good standing of Athens' highest

class, he willingly gave up his position sometime in mid-life in order to

live a life of "extreme poverty" as a philosopher (Apology, p.23b).

During this time he spent his time going around the town engaging people

in conversations on various issues.  Although he insisted he was not a

teacher (Apology, p.33a), there soon gathered around him a group of young

men (one of whom was Plato), interested in learning the art of philosophy

by following his example.



    The most significant part of Socrates' career, as recorded by Plato in

his Apology, began when his lifelong friend, Chaerephon, asked the Delphic

oracle whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates.  When Socrates heard

that the priestess had answered "no", he felt he had been presented with a

riddle to solve, since he believed he did not deserve to be called wise.

So, he went around interviewing all those who had the reputation of being

wise, such as politicians, poets, and artisans, in hopes of learning from

them what wisdom really is.  But in each case, their attempt to explain

their own "wisdom" was frustrated by Socrates' persistent questioning.

Not only were they unable to explain in what their "wisdom" consisted, but

Socrates publicly attempted to "prove" to such men that they were not, if

fact, wise.  Naturally, by questioning all of the traditional myths held

by the wealthy and powerful members of his society, he made plenty of

enemies!  But for Socrates this was not important, since in so doing he

was able to discover "that the people with the greatest reputations [for

wisdom] were almost entirely deficient, while others who were supposed to

be their inferiors were much better qualified in practical intelligence"

(Apology, pp.22a).



    Socrates' final conclusion (Apology, p.23a-b) was that the oracle did

indeed contain a riddle, a riddle whose solution is a bitter pill to

swallow for those whose role in society requires them to defend the

glories of human wisdom:



[Some people have described] me as a professor of wisdom....  But the

truth of the matter ... is pretty certainly this, that real wisdom is the

property of God, and this oracle is his way of telling us that human

wisdom has little or no value.  It seems to me that he is not referring

literally to Socrates, but has merely taken my name as an example, as if

he would say to us, The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like

Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless.



Understanding the implications of this insight is of utmost importance if

we are to understand the development of philosophy, and especially of

metaphysics, in the succeeding two thousand years.  For in this statement

Socrates clearly states the first criterion for being a good philosopher:

we must recognize our ignorance!



    The price Socrates paid for this insight was his life.  For the

powerful citizens of Athens took him to court, accusing him "of corrupting

the minds of the young, and of believing in deities of his own invention

instead of the gods recognized by the state" (Apology, p.24b). During his

trial, he defended himself not by pleading for mercy or promising to

behave in a more civilized way, but by speaking openly and harshly to his

accusers.  He explained how the philosophic life is a life which is worth

dying for.  The philosopher is the person who obeys the imperative of the

inscription on the temple at Delphi, "Know thyself".  The person who fails

to accept this challenge is in a sad situation, for "life without this

sort of examination is not worth living" (Apology, p.38a).  Indeed,

Socrates clearly regarded the life of self- examination as one lived in

service to God:  although he intentionally cast doubt on the proliferation

of gods in the Greek tradition, Socrates himself regarded philosophy as a

divinely inspired vocation.  Only by living such a life can a person be

virtuous, and so help to usher in a just society:



For I spend all my time going about trying to persuade you, young and old,

to make your first and chief concern not for your bodies nor for your

possessions, but for the highest welfare of your souls ...  Wealth does

not bring goodness [i.e., virtue], but goodness brings wealth and every

other blessing, both to the individual and to the state.  (Apology,

p.30a-b)



    Such statements, of course, must have seemed like a slap on the face

to those he was speaking to, many of whom would have regarded Socrates as

a (former) friend, since he had himself been a member of that very court

at one time.  So it is hardly surprising that when the votes were counted,

Socrates was condemned to death (albeit, by the rather narrow margin of

281 to 220). But instead of being outraged by this decision, Socrates

accepted it with calm integrity, predicting that the number of those who

are willing to question the status quo--i.e., the number of

philosophers--will increase, rather than decrease, as a result of his

death (Apology, p.39c)!  Rather than shrinking back in fear of death, he

boldly described how his task as a philosopher had been the task of

learning how to die.  Thus Plato's Apology ends (p.42a) with Socrates

exclaiming:  "Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live,

but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God."



    Socrates' prediction concerning the growth of philosophy turned out to

be accurate.  For in the wake of Socrates' death came Plato, in whose

writings Socrates' own ideas have been preserved.  Unfortunately, many

"Postsocratic" philosophers have not been as ready to question those who

wield the power in society.  This is partly due to the fact that the

relationship between philosophers and the "city" has changed radically

since Socrates' time. Philosophy is now usually an acceptable part of the

status quo.  And this change began, rather surprisingly, with Plato

himself.



    Plato presented his philosophical ideas in the form of Dialogues.

These books transform Socrates' habit of persistent questioning into a

specific philosophical method.  On one level, a Dialogue is simply a book

that records a conversation between a main speaker--usually Socrates in

Plato's Dialogues--and one or more secondary characters.  In the course of

this conversation the main character acts as a "midwife" for the potential

insights waiting to be "born" in the minds of the other characters.

(Socrates' mother, incidentally, was a midwife by profession.)  In other

words, just as a good midwife coaches the pregnant mother so that the

mother can give birth to her baby (rather than the midwife having to take

the baby out by force), so also the main character asks questions and

offers suggestions which, as it were, "coach" the secondary characters in

such a way that they discover the desired conclusion without having to be

told what it is.  But on a deeper level, the significance of this new

method lies in its appeal to a higher authority, reason, as the proper

arbitrator of all disputes.  The dialogue is carried out under the

assumption that this higher authority, to which each person has equal

access, is capable of imparting a deeper understanding of ultimate

reality, or truth.  The way the method is supposed to work can therefore

be depicted as follows:



[Figure 4.2:  The Method of Dialogue]



    Plato used the method of dialogue to construct, on the basis of his

understanding of Socrates' ideas (though undoubtedly going beyond them in

certain respects), the first thoroughgoing system of metaphysics with a

modern ring.  His philosophy, which provides the archetype of all

"idealist" metaphysical systems, is far too complex to study in any depth

in a course like this.  However, by looking briefly into his theories of

knowledge and of human nature, we should be able to get a good sampling of

how his idealism works.



    The branch of philosophy concerned with answering questions about the

nature and origin of human knowledge is called "Epistemology" (from the

Greek words epistemos, which means "knowledge", and logos, which here is

best taken to mean "the study of").  Metaphysics and epistemology are

always intimately related to each other, since a philosopher's

understanding of what reality ultimately is will inevitably influence his

or her account of how we know what is real, and vice versa.  So for the

remainder of our study of metaphysics, I will include in my account of

each new philosopher a description of his epistemology.



    Plato's epistemology is based on the assumption that "universals" (or

what he sometimes calls "forms" or "ideas") are the only true reality,

whereas "particulars" (i.e., "matter" or "things") are only appearances of

this reality.  In much of our everyday experience we therefore suffer from

the illusion that the things and objects around us in the physical world

constitute the ultimate reality.  The actual situation for mankind is that

our ideas reveal to us not merely subjective inner states, but the true

nature of reality itself.  The philosopher's ultimate task, therefore, is

to look beyond the mere appearances of things in order to come to know

these ideas.



    In Book VII of his greatest dialogue, Republic, Plato has Socrates

compare the human situation to a group of men who have been prisoners

inside a cave since their childhood.  Their necks and legs are chained in

such a way that they are unable to look towards the opening of the cave.

There is a wall behind them, and on the other side of the wall men carry

images and shapes of different sorts which stick up over the wall.  Behind

them all is the light from a great fire (which is later identified as the

sun).  Hence, the men are able to see only the shadows these objects cast

on the back of the cave. Because the men have never known anything other

than these shadows, they mistake the shadows for the real beings.



    The analogy, at least in this simplified form, is quite

straightforward. The cave represents the world we live in, and the men in

chains represent those who have not yet learned to philosophize.  The

shadows are the material objects ("appearances") we normally treat as

real.  And the objects casting the shadows are the true "forms" of these

appearances, whose nature can be revealed to us through philosophical

reflection.  The philosopher's task, therefore, is to become aware of

these true forms by breaking the chains which bind us to the illusory

reality of the material world; this is done by reflecting upon our ideas,

and learning to treat them as the ultimate reality.  This is Plato's

version of the recognition of ignorance:  our ignorance remains only as

long as we continue to make the mistake of treating the material world as

ultimately real.  For this happens whenever we turn our backs on the sun,

which represents the highest of all ideas in Plato's system, the idea of

"the good".  Goodness is the reality from which the light of reason and

truth shines forth, thus enabling us to see all the other eternal ideas.



[Figure 4.3:  Plato's Cave]



    Plato constructed a hierarchical system of ideas, ranging from those

which are more closely connected to the material world (e.g., ideas

relating to human desires) to those which can take us virtually all the

way out of the cave.  Of the latter, truth and beauty join goodness to

constitute the three highest ideas.  Although we sometimes find

approximations to them in the material world, these ideas can never in

themselves be perfectly manifested in the world of appearances.  We can

never point to something in the world and say "there it is; that is the

thing we call truth".  This is because truth is an eternally existing

form, which never changes or passes away.  Plato advises young

philosophers to begin by coming to know the lower forms, working their way

up to a universal vision of ultimate reality, which is likely to occur

only rather late in life.  The form of knowledge which serves as the most

reliable guide along the way, he argued, is mathematics, and within

mathematics, geometry. (Perhaps this is one good reason why the use of

diagrams can be helpful in understanding difficult philosophical ideas.)



    Those who succeed in attaining the goal of a universal vision, Plato

believed, are the best qualified to govern the ideal state (the

"republic"). The policies Plato thought such "philosopher-kings" should

enforce have often been harshly criticized for various reasons.  We will

look more closely at political philosophy towards the end of the third

part of this course.  But at this point it will suffice to point out that

Plato's theory of the philosopher- king deserves to be seriously

considered:  for who is more capable of ruling in a just and benevolent

way, a person who is hungry for power and authority, or one who has seen

the ideas of power and authority as they truly are?



    In working out his theory of forms Plato, like most great

philosophers, regarded the question of the ultimate reality of mankind as

one of the most significant aspects of his metaphysical theory.  So let's

conclude our discussion of Plato's idealism by looking briefly at its

implications for human nature.  If the material world is an illusion, then

the human body is obviously not the defining reality of human nature.  On

the contrary, the body, according to Plato, is what chains us to the cave,

limiting our vision to the shadows of reality.  Our true reality lies in

the idea, or form, of "humanness", which is best expressed in terms of the

idea of a "soul" (psyche).  The soul is the eternal reality which is, as

it were, imprisoned in a body whenever a person is born into this world.

As shown in Figure 4.4, it consists of three main parts, or powers:  the

"appetite" is the lowest part (corresponding to the body's belly), the

"reason" is the highest part (corresponding to the head), and the "spirit"

is the intermediate part (corresponding to the heart).



    Since the soul is eternal, there was never a time, according to Plato,

when it did not exist.  Before our birth, our soul existed in its eternal

form in the realm of ideas, to which it will return after we die.  In this

realm the soul has easy access to all knowledge, because the eternal forms

are not obscured by the darkness and limitations of the cave.  The

experience of birth causes us to forget what we used to know.  Hence,

Plato's metaphysics provides the basis for his solution to one of the most

difficult questions in epistemology:  "How do we come to know that which

we do not already know?"  The answer offered by Plato's idealism is that,

quite simply, all learning on this earth is actually remembering what we

knew before we were born.



[Figure 4.4:  The Three Powers of the Soul]



    Today I have had time only to skim the surface of the ideas put

forward by Plato (and Socrates).  We could, in fact, spend the rest of

this course examining the intricacies of his system, and even then we

would have just begun to understand the depths of his thought.  Indeed,

Plato himself believed his system of eternal forms was capable of

transforming philosophy into a science, a body of well-established

knowledge.  This has, in fact, been a goal for most philosophers ever

since.  And yet, how this is to be accomplished has been a matter of

continuous debate.  Indeed, in our next session we will examine the ideas

of a pupil of Plato's who believed a  scientific philosophy can be

established only by following a radically different path.







QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT



1. What is a question?



2. How can I go about knowing myself?



3. Could an "eternal form" change?



4. Why is it so difficult for philosophy to establish itself as a science?







RECOMMENDED READINGS



1. Plato, Apology and Republic (especially Book VII), in Edith Hamilton

and Huntington Cairns (eds.), The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1961), pp.3-26, 747-772.  (The page numbers

cited in the above lecture refer to the pagination of the Greek text,

given in the margins of the translation.)



2. Gregory Vlastos, Socrates:  Ironist and moral philosopher (Ithaca,

N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).



3. James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games:  A vision of life as play

and possibility (New York:  Ballantine Books, 1986), especially Chs.

49-50, pp.76- 78.



4. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York:  Simon and

Schuster, 1987), especially "From Socrates' Apology to Heidegger's

Rektoratsrede", pp.243-312.